Synopsis:

NUS Museum presents a new collaboration with artist Wei Leng Tay, who works with the language of the documentary format in photography, video, audio and interviews. Crossings circuits around circumstances of diaspora and identity that emerged from Wei Leng Tay's previous exhibition Discordant Symmetries (2010) in NUS Baba House. The exhibition is a four-part iteration of Wei Leng Tay's research and photographic project from 2014-2018 that spans histories of migrant individuals from different generations and backgrounds in Pakistan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Housed in the Archaeology Library in the NUS Museum, these installations are multi-lingual and polyvocal fragments that capture the vagaries in ideas of agency, nation and relationships implicit in moving between places of home. The individuals that the artist resonated with reflect on inherited (im)mobilities that are consequential to particular moments of nation-building.

About the artist
Wei Leng Tay is an artist working with photography, audio, and video that are made into installations and prints. Her process begins with conversations and interactions with people she meets, which inform the images and forms the projects take. Her works are usually based on how desires, personal relationships and histories are tied to family, society, and the state, and migration. Tay also uses formal strategies in the installations, the relationships between the visual and audio, and bodily experiences in encounters with the works to bring out cognitive and affective ways to experience the themes explored.

Tay has exhibited at spaces such as ARTER Space for Art, Istanbul, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, and Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina, and in festivals such as the Daegu Photo Biennale, South Korea, the Asian Art Biennale, Taiwan, and Noorderlicht International Photofestival, the Netherlands. Her works are part of the permanent collections of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, NUS Museum, Singapore, Hong Kong Heritage Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, and the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan.